{"id":61999,"date":"2022-02-24T09:04:52","date_gmt":"2022-02-24T14:04:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61999"},"modified":"2022-02-24T09:04:52","modified_gmt":"2022-02-24T14:04:52","slug":"the-revolt-of-the-imagination-part-two-no-more-secondhand-futures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61999","title":{"rendered":"The Revolt of the Imagination, Part Two: No More Secondhand Futures"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecosophia.net\/the-revolt-of-the-imagination-part-two-no-more-secondhand-futures\/\">The Revolt of the Imagination, Part Two: No More Secondhand Futures<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>In a post here two weeks ago I discussed the disastrous failure of imagination on the part of the industrial world\u2019s governing classes. Since then\u2014well, let\u2019s just say that for connoisseurs of elite cluelessness, it\u2019s a target-rich environment out there.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ll choose one such target more or less at random.\u00a0 Last week\u2019s news was briefly illuminated, if that\u2019s the word, by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2022\/02\/09\/uk\/nuclear-fusion-climate-energy-scn-intl\/index.html\">yet another claim<\/a>\u00a0that fusion power is racing to the rescue of the industrial world, bearing \u201cnear-limitless clean power\u201d to\u00a0 solve the climate crisis and bail out the otherwise unsustainable lifestyles of our society\u2019s privileged classes. The handwaving this time emanated from the Joint European Torus (JET) in Culham, England, where scientists managed to sustain a fusion reaction for a little more than twice as long as any previous fusion device. Sounds impressive, doesn\u2019t it?\u00a0 The excitement may flag a bit if you read the fine print and discover that the new record was around five seconds.<\/p>\n<p>The scientists boasted that during that five seconds, the reaction produced enough energy to power one house for a day. If this seems impressive to you\u2014I have to say it doesn\u2019t do much for me\u2014keep in mind also that the energy they\u2019re talking about is raw heat.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t factor in the inevitable losses that come in when you take that heat, convert it into electricity via steam turbines or the like, and send it out into the grid. Nor did they subtract from their machine\u2019s output the very considerable inputs of energy that had to go into making the reaction happen\u2014fusion only happens at extremely high temperatures, and a tokamak-style reactor like the one in Culham also requires fantastically strong magnetic fields to confine the hot plasma&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Revolt of the Imagination, Part Two: No More Secondhand Futures In a post here two weeks ago I discussed the disastrous failure of imagination on the part of the industrial world\u2019s governing classes. Since then\u2014well, let\u2019s just say that for connoisseurs of elite cluelessness, it\u2019s a target-rich environment out there. We\u2019ll choose one such [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[14401,15417,5933,32684,1758],"class_list":["post-61999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-clean-power","tag-ecosophia","tag-fusion","tag-fusion-energy","tag-john-michael-greer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61999"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62000,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61999\/revisions\/62000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}